The Gunny Sack

by M G Vassanji

  Seven years passed; seven years of childless marriage, in which joshis, pandits, sheikhs and pirs were consulted, stars, tea leaves, palm and archaica read, predictions made and proved false. Then came Suleiman Pir. He was a holy man from Bombay who had a strong following in East Africa. Whenever Suleiman Pir came from Bombay, a mela was held. Families gathered in clusters in a big festive field and he, accompanied by attendants bearing his chair and an umbrella, would come and sit in their midst, asking after their health and wealth, blessing their offerings of food and newly announced marriages. Suleiman Pir was short and thin, fair like a Parsee, with a long nose, and he wore a white suit and a topee. Hassam Pirbhai’s clan had gathered with five married children plus my three aunts, now married, and my father, and a horde of grandchildren. Suleiman Pir, having blessed collectively one and all, having blessed the vast trays of fruit and nuts brought before him, was seated, wiping his face, suffering the attentions of the old man and his sons, ready to go to the next family waiting for him. Then he saw my father and mother, sitting together by themselves, and he asked for their children. “Where is the aulaad?”

  “No aulaad, Pir Saheb,” said my father.

  “No aulaad at all?”

  “None at all, Pir Saheb.”

  My father did not think it proper to ask, but the pir heard the plea in his voice, he read and understood the beseeching eyes of my mother. He picked up an apple from a nearby fruit tray, whispered a prayer over it, and handed it to my mother. “You will have aulaad,” he said, and left.

  In the commotion of attendants rushing after him, the men and women looking with awe as he passed (it was said that you could not meet his eyes), forgetting their restless children meanwhile, and then preparing to leave, the apple was picked up by one of the wives and put away with the other fruit.

  There followed a ruckus. My mother imputed bad faith to Hassam Pirbhai’s family and rushed to gouge out the eyes of Shiri, one of the daughters-in-law. “You bastard-bitch, you born of a pig—” The mela turned into a mêlée.

  The females of Hassam Pirbhai’s family converged around the towering Awal, in a show of sisterly solidarity. My father called helplessly from the side, while the other males of the family looked on, confident of their wives. Kulsum had some of Shiri’s skin in her nails and was perhaps in for a good clobbering.

  Enter Gula, Kulsum’s sister. Gula was three years my mother’s junior and had moved to Nairobi with her husband. She was big, fat, strong and quarrelsome, and came to stand beside my mother like a bodyguard, putting her hands on her hips, throwing a challenge. “Come,” she called hoarsely.

  A war of words followed.

  The high culture these ladies had picked up in this most European of East African cities, their new snobbishness, was cast aside, and they were back in their elemental form. Here was not Parklands and Ngara anymore but the alleys of Mombasa and Zanzibar, the villages of Cutch and Kathiawad.

  “Just look at her, all blubber.”

  “Yes, just look. How her husband finds her hole, God only knows.”

  “Probably wide like a cup.”

  “Like a sack.”

  “That’s none of your business, you bitch—” my aunt Gula screamed. “You button-holed bone-pie! Yes, he sips milk and honey from this cup, do you hear? Milk and honey!” (Here she danced a small jig.) “He sees Mairaj every night—”

  “What, that sissy—”

  “Oh, yes? Come and play with his tanpura one night and hear his sweet music—”

  “Enough!” shouted Hassam Pirbhai with the twinkling eyes, now that there was cheering from the spectators. The mud-wrestlers retired.

  Meanwhile the children, like voracious army ants, were all over the food trays and one lonely apple caught Juma’s eye, and he pocketed it before it too got devoured. “Eat it,” he told Kulsum. “If you have faith it will do just as well.”

  Nine months later, on May 7, 1945, when the clash and clamour and the boom and thunder in distant Europe seemed finally to show signs of subsiding, as King George was addressing his subjects over the radio and talking of peace, Kulsum went into labour. My grandmother Hirbai was present, flown in by my father from Dar. And as Jenabai Midwife put the little girl in my exultant father’s arms, he slipped her a hundred-shilling note as gift. Thus was born my sister Begum, King George’s daughter. Kulsum had gone without meat for the nine months, and not until every girl in the girls’ school had been fed pilau and sweets, not until Kulsum had been to the mosque, placing coconut and shilling, coconut and shilling, on every step as she descended and came home, did she touch meat.

  The rest of us came easily.

  Kulsum’s theory of creation.

  When God was well and ready after all his exertions finally to create mankind, he sat himself beside a red-hot oven with a plate of dough. From this he fashioned three identical dolls. He put the first doll into the oven to finish it, but, alas, brought it out too soon: it came out white and undone. In this way was born the white race. With this lesson learnt, the Almighty put the second doll into the oven, but this time he kept it in for too long. It came out burnt and black. Thus the black race. Finally the One and Only put the last doll inside the oven, and brought it out at just the right time. It came out golden brown, the Asian, simply perfect.

  (Thus our nicknames: Sona for the golden boy, the youngest and favourite, my brother Jamal; Kala for the one who came between, Salim, Salum in Swahili, the overdone.)

  There followed the years of contentment, the Eden of our later dreams. We would remember them by the tins of Black Magic and Trebor, Kit-Kats and candyfloss and Pez; school ties, blazers and cardigans; toy trains that ran on steel tracks, prizes won at baby shows. There is a Black Magic box full of old photos in my gunny. A picture of my father shows him drinking a toast with his friends: Juka Chacha and Au Chacha and Babu Chacha and Mithoo Chacha, and two Europeans who could be District Officers, all jovially raising their glasses. A family picture shows my father and mother seated at two extremes, five children in between. Standing between them, three girls in identical pinafores of a dotted material and a bow in front, King George’s daughter Begum with our cousins Mehroon and Yasmin. Sitting in front of the girls, Sona and Kala.

  Sunday afternoons, having visited uncles and aunts first, we would drive to City Park in T8016, our black Prefect, for the “band-waja.” Juma would park the car, and we would stroll towards the bandstand and stop some distance away. There would be European couples, and white nannies sitting primly on the few chairs, their knitting on their laps, chatting with each other, and African ayahs sitting on the grass, their bare feet pointing upwards. Surrounding the bandstand would be a wreath of white children playing, running after each other with spades and buckets, bows and arrows and guns, shouting and laughing. The bandsmen, black except for the leader, were in khaki shorts and shirts, red sashes round their middles, red fezzes on their heads. The drummer wore a splendid leopard skin over his front, and he would twirl his sticks round and round on his fingers and catch them at just the right time and thwack his drum. In the centre of the semicircle, conducting, was the white bandleader in a white uniform. At six o’clock sharp there would be a long roll on the drum: the scurrying European children froze, the nannies climbed stiffly to their feet, arranging their frocks, and closer at hand Kulsum’s sharp eyes kept her children in reasonable control (her perpetual complaint: “How well the European children are behaved! Did you see anyone asking them to keep still?”), and with beating hearts we heard the bars of God Save the King announcing the end of our Sunday fun.

  Beautiful, beautiful Nairobi. But all was not well in this Eden; there were rumours, rumours in Government offices and the big stores that supplied them, rumours in the bars and the clubs … of an evil secret society … and a fear rustled ever so slightly in the background, rearing its head sporadically like a devil toying with children, with a murder here and a fire there. The dreaded words were Mau Mau.

  On the evening of October 20, 195
2, when my father Juma came home, we all waited expectantly in bed for the clap of his hands to bring us jumping out of our beds, for the drive out to Icelands for ice-cream. But the door was firmly shut, all the bolts fastened and checked, the windows locked, the curtains drawn.

  “What’s up?” asked Kulsum anxiously.

  “Something is going on,” he replied. “I don’t know what. There are rumours. We’ll stay indoors and wait.” He turned on the radio. A talk show was on, discussing farming techniques in Kenya.

  Early the next morning we were woken by the sound of lorries—not one or two, but a military convoy carrying white soldiers.

  “Is this a new war or something?” asked my mother.

  “How should I know?” came the impatient reply. “Keep the children at home. Tell Abdulla to stay out—” Playing tough, he pretended he would go to work, going behind a door, draped in khanga at the waist, to change—until, as expected, Kulsum expressed alarm and absolutely refused him permission to go out. Shortly afterwards, at breakfast, the funereal tones of the Hindustani Service announced that the Governor was going on air. The Emergency was declared; Mau Mau was an acknowledged word.

  The First Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers had arrived the previous evening and was now making its appearance on the streets of Nairobi in a flag march, driving around in the backs of military lorries, bayonets fixed, meaning business. In Mombasa the cruiser HMS Kenya had docked, and the Royal Marines were giving a similar show of British might. The Europeans waved, Asians heaved sighs of relief. “Peace at last,” said my father when he heard the Governor.

  But peace did not truly come, and violence hovered nearby.

  At about this time my Aunt Gula died. Unfortunately, she had been too accurate about what she described as her husband’s musical prowess. One day she doused herself with kerosene and set herself aflame. The forty days of mourning had not passed when her husband announced his marriage to a young nurse. They went to Mombasa, taking his two boys with them; my cousins Mehroon and Yasmin came to stay with us permanently.

  At the firm of Hassam Pirbhai, Pioneer Trader, European farmers from the Highlands would stop by, Government servants of all races would check in. Close by were the Rendezvous, where they could have cakes and English tea, the Ismailia, from where they could order samosas and brewed Indian tea, and the New Stanley, where they could sip martinis under bright canopies in the sun and watch the traffic on Delamere Avenue directed into neat lanes by a traffic policeman in starched whites. Woolworths, the first Nairobi supermarket, agents for Reader’s Digest, and vendors of the London Times, the Illustrated London News, and much else besides, was a stone’s throw away. From this European and Asian hub, my father would come home at lunch and dinner time, bringing news of the Mau Mau.

  The Bucks were a young English couple with a farm in Kinangop, and a seven-year-old son. Mrs. Buck was a doctor who ran a part-time clinic on the farm. The Bucks were regular customers at Hassam Pirbhai’s. They bought their safari clothes and their servants’ khakis from the store. They had bought a tent. Recently they had installed a siren. One evening at dinnertime, the servant walked in from the kitchen bringing with him an armed gang. The bodies of the man and wife were found horribly mutilated in the dining room. The boy’s body was found in bed, in what was said to be a worse condition. Civilized Nairobi was sickened. “No worse horror can be imagined, no worse butchery described,” wrote the Nairobi Herald. The settler community was up in arms. At the dinner table my father expressed profound shock. “Their own servant,” he would say. “This, our Abdulla, suppose he turned around tomorrow and betrayed us—” “Don’t say such things,” Kulsum said. “Besides, he’s not a Kikuyu. He’s a Muslim.”

  A few weeks later there occurred the Lari massacre, right under the nose of the Uplands police station. Lari housed a large number of Kikuyu loyalists, including the Kikuyu Home Guard. That morning the local detachment of the King’s African Rifles had been called away; that night the Kikuyu Home Guard were patrolling the forest; so when the Mau Mau arrived there were plenty of women and children … when the huts were set on fire on the Lari plain, there were enough women and children. When the Home Guard returned to charred and mutilated bodies, all the strength in the world could not have stifled their howls of anguish.

  Feelings ran high the following weeks, fear was at an intense pitch.

  “What are the British good for, anyway? ‘About turn, left-right,’ parading on Delamere Avenue, but no action.”

  “Aré, what we need are the Gurkhas. These Fusiliers are just dandies—boys from England. One platoon of Gurkhas could chase these Kukus up Mount Kenya—”

  On a Sunday my Chachas had gathered at our home, playing bridge. In the courtyard Abdulla had grilled meat for supper. When the men had finished their meal, the servant brought water in a jug for them to wash their hands. He would go to each one at a time and pour water on the fingers held over the plate. Some water fell on Ali Chacha’s lap; our favourite Chacha who wore dark glasses and had brought my father a set of Kashmiri daggers. Ali Chacha got up in a fury and gave poor Abdulla a slap on the face and a kick. “Blaady basket! Blaady Kikuyu Mau Mau—”

  “But he’s not Kikuyu,” insisted the girl from Mombasa, “he’s a Muslim.”

  Poor Abdulla ran sobbing to his room.

  A few days after the Lari incident, my father brought home a pistol. It stayed in the thief-proof compartment of his wardrobe. Every night for a few weeks, before retiring, he would take the key from Kulsum, and get the gun out. Then, as my anxious mother watched with prayers on her lips, he would open the front door and, taking steady aim, fire twice into the pitch darkness that was the shrubs, trees and refuse dump of the unused lot across the road.

  There once was an incident, or non-incident, that we would all like to forget. It conflicts too much with our image of our father: Juma, who consorted with police inspectors and DOs, who had once been served a drink at the Norfolk Hotel, whom people came to call in the middle of the night seeking help and influence.

  Operation Anvil was under way to wipe out the Mau Mau and there were regular spot-checks by what we called the military police. The military police were British soldiers, the police, and the police reserves, including local vigilantes. The pass book was introduced and the city was being searched sector by sector for Mau Mau sympathizers. Cars were stopped, trunks searched, and passengers scrutinized. In residential areas servants were questioned, often with slaps and kicks. In all cases, suspicious-looking Kikuyus were taken away in caged trucks like wild animals to a zoo.

  One evening while returning from the mosque, my father was waved to a stop at the bridge on Nairobi River, just before the road climbs up to Ngara and Parklands. It was here that the incident or non-incident occurred. Two European men, almost boys, one questioning my father outside, the other leering inside, the car packed with Kulsum and five children. The road was dark but the two men had torches and there was light from other cars. Just that. An exclamation from my mother, my father getting into the car and snapping at her question. A hushed ride home. Begum would say later that the military policeman slapped my father. “Don’t be silly,” Kulsum would answer, “he was only flipping the pages of his book. Did your father look like a Kikuyu? And anyway he complained.”

  The gunny would like to throw out one more bad memory. Spit out a pang of conscience that’s been eating away at the insides, like a particularly thorny pip that’s been swallowed. Operation Anvil again. Hundreds of Kikuyus, guilty and not guilty, were sent away every day to await further screening; thousands waited at Langata. One night fearful Mary, Mary with the long, bony head and big, white teeth, this time wearing an old dress of Kulsum who had become bigger, knocked on the door. With her was a man. My father went outside to talk to them, and Kulsum was in a panic. Whenever my mother was agitated, her eyes would widen, she would turn pale and look in front of her, sometimes picking her chin. You could tell she was praying, some mantra was being invoked.
r />   My father came in and said, “She wants us to keep her son.”

  “And you said yes?”

  “How could I refuse? Anyway, let’s wait till tomorrow. Give me the key, I’ll hide him in the store room.”

  “Jambo, mama!” Mary peeped in from outside.

  “Jambo,” my mother replied woodenly.

  Actually, Mary had begged my father to employ her son and get him a pass book. All night my father and mother sat up in bed looking at each other, frightened, waiting for the night to pass. Stories of Mau Mau murders, of trusted servants taking grisly oaths and betraying their employers to grisly deaths, went through their minds. Every rustle outside acquired menace, even the crickets sounded eerie, and every motor vehicle that sounded as if it might stop at any moment could have been the military police.

  At daybreak, my father took us all to the neighbour’s house, then he walked to the road and hailed a passing police car and said that there was a man hiding in his store room. Mary’s son was found among sacks of rice, potatoes, and onions, hiding in an empty sack, and taken away.

  “The police would have found him anyway,” said my father.

  We never saw Mary again. Perhaps she too was taken away, to be screened, detained even. Was she a Mau Mau sympathizer? What did we know of her—a friend from another world who came periodically and then once at night in an hour of need—whose memory we now carry branded forever in our conscience …

  The Mau Mau years did not tarnish our memories of Eden.

  “Just when we had established ourselves, when the future lay open before us, he went away,” Kulsum would say. And I, who took it all away, would look down in shame.

  Four gallons of milk were spilt one day and all her happiness was washed away with it …

  Four gallons of milk, boiled once in the morning and skimmed for the malai, now carried back to the fire by Yasmin to be heated. The pan is large and shiny, used only for the milk, and wide and heavy, and she walks in small jerky steps, grimy feet on a grimy floor, face twisted in a grimace, shouting, “Move … move, basi—oh Mother!” Kulsum is sending Abdulla on an errand, I fail to move out of Yasmin’s way and bang into her, she stumbles back and four gallons of milk come pouring down my dark little body.